Painting Collection Claude Monet The Pointe du Petit Ailly in Gray Weather (1840—1926) After painting the Normandy coast during periodic trips between 1882 and 1884, Claude Monet returned to the region in early 1897 for a few months to find inspiration from the dramatic cliffsides and seaside views. Around this time, Monet wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel: “…I needed to see the sea again and am enchanted to see once more so many things that I did here fifteen years ago.” He revisited several sites he had painted before, including this edge of a gorge in Varengeville, near Petit Ailly. He captures the landscape from a high bluff, framing the cliff with a heightened, precarious perspective. In this canvas, Monet challenged conventional constructions of landscape painting, filling the composition with a monumental mass of earth, with the sea and sky only visible in thin bands along the edges. The artist painted this view again and again in different weather conditions and times of day. This atmospheric moment is captured with undulating brushstrokes in purples and greens, suggesting grass or wildflowers caught in the wind. At the bottom of the composition, Monet sketched a customs house—a Napoleonic stone structure built to monitor the sea and later used by fishermen—lending the barest suggestion of a human presence to this natural scene. —Danielle O'Steen, Ph.D. |
  
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